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Doug Kershaw and Mark O'Connor 'The American Music Shop'
Music Director: Mark O'Connor - TNN
Kershaw joined O'Connor as one of his musical heroes on O'Connor's 1992 album entitled "Heroes."
American Music Shop Band
Mark O'Connor; violin, bandleader and music director
Jerry Douglas; Dobro, Lap Steel
Brent Mason/Brent Rowan; Guitars
John Jarvis/Matt Rollings; Keyboards;
Glen Worf; Bass
Harry Stinson; Drums, Background Vocals
Producer; Rusty Wilcoxen
Director; Dennis Globe
Sound Mixer; Kim Raymer
Executive Producer, Show Creator; Brian O'Neill
Guests
David Holt, Maura O'Connell, Michael Johnson, Edgar Meyer, Sam Bush, Bela Fleck.
American Music Shop on TNN in Nashville featured Mark O'Connor as bandleader accompanying various musical guests each week. (1990-1993)
Chicago Tribune
Television.
Tnn's `American Music Shop' Brings Top Performers Together
July 03, 1993|By Wayne Bledsoe, Scripps-Howard News Service.
NASHVILLE - On a network filled with music, "The American Music Shop" stands out.
Nearly every show of the Nashville Network's "American Music Shop" (9 p.m. and 1 a.m. Tuesdays, TNN) is an event: Country diva Emmylou Harris performs with new star Trisha Yearwood; legendary singer-songwriter John Prine trades songs with upcoming singer-songwriter John Wesley Harding; young country star Dwight Yoakam picks with bluegrass great Ralph Stanley; Ireland's foremost band, the Chieftains, performs with Ricky Skaggs and Chet Atkins.
It's a show where individual music artists perform together, often for the first time, backed up by some of the best session players in music.
On one recent show, the host was Nanci Griffith, and it includes some of Griffith's favorite songwriters-Janis Ian, Townes Van Zandt, Jerry Jeff Walker and Frank Christiansen.
Backstage, at a television studio in Opryland, there is a happy buzz. The artists joke, eat and prepare for their parts on the show, while the artists' management and TNN employees keep things moving. On the soundstage, the house band runs through the night's numbers.
"American Music Shop" premiered in March 1990. The show's creator and executive producer, Brian O'Neill, says the idea was to make each week's musical host a person known to most country music fans, then slip in lesser known talented artists-most often people whom the host liked. That way, he says, both the audience and the artists win.
The show, TNN's fourth most popular program, seems to be a particular favorite among other musicians.
It doesn't hurt that the members of the house band have followings in their own right.
Led by master violinist, guitarist, mandolinist Mark O'Connor, the band includes Jerry Douglas, a man who has nearly reinvented the dobro; guitarist Brent Mason; bassist Glen Worf; drummer Harry Stinson; and keyboardists John Jarvis and Matt Rollings.
"In developing the show, I sold the network on getting the very best possible house band that we could get," O'Neill says.
"And that was going to be part of the draw for the show-at least from the artist's perspective."
O'Connor, probably the most popular session musician in Nashville at the time, was thrilled with the prospect.
He says the show offered the first chance for television audiences to get a look at how Nashville's studio musicians work.
articles.chicagotribune.com/19...